Some places never really recover from economic decline.
Somebody told me to read a book, which was about what happens to factory toens when the factory shuts down.
The summary I was given, was that some towns have worked more than others to attract new business.
I also heard that Pikeville Kentucky, is a success story as they have greatly expanded a college campus, which helps offset the decline of coal.mining in eastern Kentucky.
But the economic dislocation is very hard to overcome. If any employer which employs thousands shuts down, there’s no way that a new business will hire all those old workers , to do the same job b they are skilled in, at the same pay, in a new business.
Everett has Boeing’s 787 plant. Nobody has worked harder to make life difficult for Boeing than Everett. Seattle did for a time. Boeing warned them over a decade. Then one day, without calling Gary Locke, or the mayor of Seattle, they announced they were moving, and didn’t know where yet.
Both asked why they didn’t get a phone call, an attempt to keep them on board. The CEO at the time replied, “We’ve been calling for 10 years. We didn’t see the point in one more phone call.”
Boeing is the only thing supporting the middle class in Western WA. The tech companies don’t really do much - they’ve created an elite upper middle, and then a bunch of East Indian and Asian communities, many of whom have families crammed into really expensive apartments around where those companies are.
Boeing then announced South Carolina. Spinning that up has been painful for them, but worth it. The unions don’t cause near the problems they did before.
Every bit of tooling Boeing buys now is shipped such that it comes in cases on wheels. The idea is that at any given time they can take an assembly line and send it to SC.
The greenies have largely shut up too, even the ones in Seattle.
If the West Coast doesn’t fix itself, the tech business will move inland. It’s already started.
Bad immigration policy has so badly screwed up the US that it will take likely 50 years or so to fix.
One thing I AM seeing - most job placements now explicitly say ‘no visa’, and that you have to be a US citizen to apply.
Progress.